delter | Overview

MPEG is a standard
>>
for the compression of moving images and audio, and this compression allows
large media files to be more easily distributed through the Internet. Familiar
examples of such files are MPEG movies and MP3 music files.

delter is software which operates between the frames of an
MPEG movie. By extracting and rendering only the inter-frame motion vectors,
objects in the movie are effaced, and only the ghostly traces of movement
remain.

Screenshots

Launch

Choose movie file

I found these MPEG-1 files on the web and copied them to my server for
convenience. Appended are links to where I found each of these movies.

Select applet dimensions

Usage

Controls and options

delter will launch full-screen, and the deltered movie will
automatically begin. The movie controls and options are accessed by clicking
on the tabs on the edges of the applet.

The main controls allow you to play and pause the movie.

The option controls allow you to toggle the delter effect, the fade
effect between frames, the amount of zoom, the speed of
playback, and monochrome / color display. While most of these
controls are immediate in effect, the delter toggle takes effect gradually, so
be patient, as the transitions can be quite nice.

If you zoom
into the movie and the movie is bigger than the size of the applet, you can
pan the view by dragging the mouse along the movie surface.

Offsite MPEGs

You may feed delter with the URL of any MPEG-1 movie. Note
that not all MPEG movies will work, only MPEG-1 movies. Further, a few MPEG
movies are not encoded with any motion vectors, so these will not show any
delter effect, but you may still view the movie undeltered. Tip: to copy the
URL of an MPEG link, use your mouse to access the context menu for the link
(ctrl-click on Mac, right-click on Windows) and select "Copy Link to
Clipboard" or "Copy Link Address" or "Copy Shortcut" or whatever similar
fucking verbiage. Then paste in the text box above.

Technical Requirements

You need a Java-enabled browser.

Remarks

A recent paper in Physical Review Letters
>>
describes using the technique of file compression to analyze texts
of different languages to gauge the relative similarities and differences
between languages. Using this method, they were able to group languages into
families, and even point out which languages (eg Basque) stood apart from the
others. Of course, these results are old news to linguists, but the difference
here is the surprising use of data compression as a tool for analysis.
A good synopsis >>
is at ArsTechnica, and
a less technical intro >>
is at The Economist.

The authors used the technique of file compression, a popular example
being ZIP files, to analyze the languages. They discovered that the amount the
two files could be combined and compressed revealed the "distance" between the
two texts. In a similar way, MPEG files use data compression to encode only
the differences between movie frames. A highly static movie will compress more
than a dynamic one since there is less motion data to encode. Thus the amount
of compression, eg file size, can be a metric for the amount of movement in
an MPEG file. delter takes advantage of this compression
scheme to render only the "delta" information, that is, the changes between
frames.

The idea that the artifacts of data compression can reveal bits about the
structure of the information processed is beautiful to me. This is the
motivation behind delter. By exposing only the relative
motion data, delter reveals something of the structure of
movement in a movie. And, what is revealed is not simply the movement of the
objects in the frame, but also the movement of the eyes of the camera.
Moreover, if, following Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement Image, the
camera shot can be equated with a sort of a-subjective consciousness, then by
visualizing only the inter-frame motion vectors via delter,
we perhaps obtain a glimpse of the movement of (a-subjective, machinic)
thought.

Code

This code is distributed under the GNU General Public License >>,
meaning you can freely use it and modify it, as long as you
also distribute the resulting product under the same license.

Credits

delter works using a modified MPEG-1 codec. I doctored
a sample MPEG-1 decoder implementation in Java
>>
written by Dr.-Ing. Jörg Anders at the Technische Universität
Chemnitz. His code and mine are released under the GNU General Public License.

Road

Included in Internet Art >> by Rachel Greene, published by Thames & Hudson.

delter shown at
info@blah: Artists respond to information overload at the Mills
Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts from April - June, 2003.